According to one global survey, more respondents were frustrated on-year with the vulnerable authentication method, but the system is too entrenched.
In an Aug 2023 online survey of 10,010 consumers across the U.K., France, Germany, U.S., Australia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, India and China on authentication technology trends and cybersecurity sentiments, respondents generally wanted stronger, more user-friendly alternatives to password log-in methods.
Other trends discerned from the data include the trend that password log-ins with a second-factor authentication (or higher) was still dominant across use cases: respondents were entering a password manually nearly four times a day on average.
Other findings include:
- On average, biometrics was considered by respondents as the most secure of other available authentication methods, and was the popular preference.
- 58% of respondents were aware of passkeys, compared to 41% of respondents of the yearly survey of the previous year
- 58% or more of respondents from the Asia Pacific region had seen an increase in suspicious messages and scams, while 56% believed that cyber threats had become more sophisticated.
- 62% of all respondents were giving up accessing services online, 45% were abandoning purchases because they could not remember their passwords: an 8% increase over the results of a similar survey last year.
- 70% of all respondents in the survey had had to reset and recover passwords in the last two months because they had forgotten them
- With new AI tools that make phishing attacks even more convincing and widespread, old and unreliable methods like passwords and one-time passwords were lowering trust levels among respondents.
According to Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director, FIDO Alliance, which commissioned the survey for their Online Authentication Barometer: “In the Asia-Pacific region, we see a growing interest among consumers in adopting more robust authentication methods, with biometrics emerging as a favored choice… APAC (respondents) are on a par with other regions globally in looking to reduce their reliance on legacy authentication methods. Nonetheless, the persistently high password usage without 2FA is a concern, highlighting (rarely) consumers are offered alternatives like biometrics, resulting in lingering usage.”
